OBJECTIVE To describe the perception of lecturers and undergraduate nursing students regarding the dialogic experience in the informal spaces and its relationship with training in health. METHOD Experiential descriptions were collected in the context of a public university in the non-metropolitan region of the state of Bahia, Brazil, using open interviews. These descriptions were analyzed acc...

The research reported in this study focuses on how distance students can learn to use argumentation processes as a tool for learning. For ten weeks, 30 student teachers studied the webbased 15 credit course Teacher Assignment. Data were collected from five student groups’ asynchronous argumentation, relating to authentic cases of teacher leadership. Focus was placed on the extent to which stude...

This paper describes the development of CATS or Cognitive Affordances of Technologies Scale, a tool that can aid faculty, instructional designers, and e-learning specialists in identifying and leveraging the cognitive affordances of a learning technology. CATS includes seven multi-disciplinary research supported categories of cognitive affordances that can be harnessed to enrich student learnin...

This paper reports on a study which examined the occurrence of ‘exploratory talk’, as defined by Barnes (1976) and Mercer (1995), amongst peers in collaborative small groups in secondary school mathematics classrooms (11 to 16 years) in a UK school. This form of talk is thought to contribute to mathematical reasoning. The classroom learning environment in which the study was undertaken is based...

In this paper, we explore the idea of weak ties in networked learning. We go back to the original conception of the strength of weak ties (Granovetter 1973) and relate this to a dialogic understanding of networked learning (Koschmann 1999, Dysthe 2002). These theoretical ideas are applied to the examination of two networked settings in which educational leaders exchange ideas and have the poten...

Dialogic reading is an evidence-based intervention to promote the language skills of 2and 3-year-old children. This study examined conditions under which dialogic reading could be implemented in a community setting. Three methods of instruction were compared: (a) in-person with video instruction in small groups, (b) self-instruction by video with telephone follow-up and, (c) self-instruction by...

This paper addresses the challenge and potential of online higher and continuing education, of fostering and promoting, in a global perspective across time and space, democratic values working for a better world. Such values include mutual political and intercultural understanding, collaboration, and tolerance to cultural and ethical diversity, and they are mediated through collaborative dialog...